Time-space transform based Model Predictive Control for accelerated and controlled cooling process

In accelerated & controlled cooling (ACC) process, the relationship between plate point´s temperature and the manipulated variable, plate velocity, is complicate and nonlinear with a time delay. A novel Model Predictive Control (MPC) is developed for precise control of the plate point´s final temperature (FT) with fast computational speed. The control objective of time-temperature curve (plate temperature evolution) is converted into a space distribution of plate temperature along cooling line, which simplifies the ACC model to a linear model then does beneficial to employ MPC directly for optimizing the FT of plate points. The predictive horizon and control horizon of MPC is reduced to one or two sample time since the space distribution of plate temperature contains the future information of plate point´s temperature, then dramatically reduce the computational burden. The simulation result shows the efficiency of the proposed method.